Oddly tired at the moment. Slept a lot this weekend, without really taking the edge off it. Then tried to work, to catch up a bit on work not done last week, with not much success. Meh again. Let me try rummaging in my camera card, maybe that will be more successful.

Small triumph: the nasturtium tropoleum that I planted a few years ago still likes the garden, and has thrown up a string of brilliantly red flowers. It has a reputation as a picky plant, so I'm pleased it likes it well enough to be fighting the rest of the garden successfully.

Things have got terribly overgrown with amazing speed. It wasn't long ago that I mowed this path and cut the fern back, one good rain and the rosebushes and the ferns have all gone flomp. I know how they feel.

Foster Carlos has also gone flomp. His dog bed technique has improved a lot since he first arrived and he has gone from flopping randomly over the edge of the dog bed to fitting himself inside it quite neatly.

I'm quite pleased about this, because I think it means that his hips are becoming more flexible and he's not so stiff. He's definitely more mobile now, happily wriggling under things (though I did have to lift him over a stile the other day. He's getting some muscle back on his bottom. I wish I could have videoed him running with Brythen and Rosie this evening. He properly, properly ran, a real greyhound run, not just lolloping, no dragging his feet or slipping over as he did to begin with. And he wasn't stiff afterwards either.

Comments

So glad he's getting better! The nasturtium looks spectacular. Is that the one that people put in salads?

We've had a lot of heat, but not much rain in the last week, unlike the week before. I pruned back the Vallaris glabra and the Melastoma malabathricum, which were crowding the Tiger Orchid, and re-potted the rosemary, which turned out to actually be two plants rather than two stems on one root, so I separated them. The supermarket had rosemary seed, so I bought a packet and will try sprouting it. Perhaps seed-grown plants will be a bit better adapted to local conditions.

My soil is clay of the most impenetrable sort, so my rosemary has to grow in pots.

I remember reading somewhere that he changed the name because it was too Latinate. "Nasturtian" was some dialectal variant, I think.

I have seen assorted criticisms about potatoes, and tomatoes and pipeweed being found in Middle Earth, but obviously, all of these were discovered by the Numenoreans on their voyages and introduced into their colonies.